Help with PVR on SV360 Premiere

[sunman]

I just bought the SV360 and was able to hook it up to get 110, 119, and 61.5. All works great. I now want to connect a Maxtor 250G Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to it to work with the PVR functionality and having all kinds of problems.

When I hook up the HDD to the USB port in the back, and go to the PVR Menu, I see that the receiver recognizes the HDD as a C: drive. However, when I try to use the PVR Functionality, I get an error. I've seen in other posts that the drive needs to be formatted to FAT32, and I want the receiver to format the drive. However, when I press the yellow button to format from the SV360's PVR menu, nothing happens (its not an option). Formating to FAT32 using Windows XP is difficult, at least I haven't been able to figure it out.

Does anyone know how to get this to work ? Any suggestions would be welcome.

[Ultra 500]

I just bought the SV360 and was able to hook it up to get 110, 119, and 61.5. All works great. I now want to connect a Maxtor 250G Hard Disk Drive (HDD) to it to work with the PVR functionality and having all kinds of problems.

When I hook up the HDD to the USB port in the back, and go to the PVR Menu, I see that the receiver recognizes the HDD as a C: drive. However, when I try to use the PVR Functionality, I get an error. I've seen in other posts that the drive needs to be formatted to FAT32, and I want the receiver to format the drive. However, when I press the yellow button to format from the SV360's PVR menu, nothing happens (its not an option). Formating to FAT32 using Windows XP is difficult, at least I haven't been able to figure it out.

Does anyone know how to get this to work ? Any suggestions would be welcome.
With XP try this. Plug in HDD to desktop via USB. Once computer recognizes it go to My Computer and right click that drive. You should now have the option to select "Format" from that menu. Clik on on it and follow the instructions there. Also check in your receiver section to see if there are any HDD that don't work with that unit or can be modified.

[sunman]

Thanks Ultra. However, in XP, the only format option is for NTFS (FAT32 is not an available option). As well, how do I check the compatibility of the disk with the receiver (which receiver section do you mean ?) ?

[sunman]

Success ! After much research, trial and error, and experimenting. I am posting my findings, if others want to try this.

What I am Using:
Windows XP Home Edition (XP)
Maxtor Onetouch 4 Mini 250G (HDD)
Sonicview 360 Premiere (SV360)

My Conclusions, right or wrong, this is what I believe is going on:
- XP won't give me option to format the HDD as FAT32 because it is too big (250G), only option is NTFS
- Max size allowed with XP to format at FAT32 is 32G

So the solution is to format the HDD as a 32G FAT32. The way to do that is as follows:
Note: Please understand that formating the HDD will remove all data on the drive. In my case, the HDD was an external new drive, so I had no issues about losing data.

1) Plug in the HDD and go to my computer and figure out the drive letter (in my case f:)
2) Now left click start
3) Find "My Computer" and RIGHT click it
4) Choose Manage from the menu
5) In the Computer Management panel that comes up, click Disk Management in the left hand pane (look under the storage category)
6) Find your HDD drive on the (in my case f:) on the bottom right side, and RIGHT Click it
7) If its already formated as NTSF as mine was, then choose "Delete Partition" to delete that formating
8) The entire drive should now show as "Unallocated"
9) Right click the "unallocated" area and click "New Partition"
10) A windows partition will come up, hit next
11) Choose Primary Partition and hit next
12) Change the "Partition Size in MB" to 32000 (that is the same as 32G)
13) Hit Next, and then next again
14) Now make sure that you choose "Format this partition with the following settings" option
15) In the "File System" area, make sure you choose "FAT32," and leave the rest as-is (you can assign a volume name and click "quick format" if you like)
16) Then click "Finish" on the next screen and let the formatting begin and complete

When you now take the HDD back to the SV360, it will work as intended. If you get any erros, do a hard reboot of the SV360 and it will work.

Having done the formatting this way, presents an interesting issue. The HDD is a 250G drive, but I am only using 32G ... seems like an awful waste. Therefore, I tried creating new partitions of FAT32 on the HDD. I discovered that XP only allows for a total of 4 partitions on the HDD. Therefore, I tried the following configurations:
- 4 partitions of FAT32 using the above method
- 3 partitions of FAT32 and 1 of NTFS utilizing the total disk capacity

But, when I connected the HDD back to the SV360, I discovered that although the SV360 could see the partitions, it could only use the first FAT32 partition. Therefore, it seems as if your limited to 32G usage by the SV360 on 1 drive.

Therefore, I've reformatted my HDD as follows:
- 1 FAT32 32G partition for use with SV360
- 1 NTFS partition on the HDD for the remainder of the space

This allows full use of the HDD, the NTFS portion can only be accessed via my computer (it cant be used with the SV360) ... Not the the ideal solution, but at least I get to use the full capacity of the HDD.

If anyone has tried this and has a better solution, please share ...